During one of the meetings of the World Water Commission,
which recently submitted its report in The Hague to a bevy
of water ministers, a member had strongly emphasised the need
for educating politicians about the importance of water. I,
however, found that argument incorrect because I have rarely
met a politician, especially in India, who will not emphasise
the importance of water. The real problem is that hardly any
of them know how to solve the water problem. Teaching them
is difficult.

Remember Chandrashekhar and his Bharat Yatra. The most important
thing on his development agenda after he completed his marathon
was water. Read Atal Behari Vajpayees address to the
parliament on NDAs action plan for the nation. Vajpayee
says that if there is one thing he is going to do in five
years of his rule is to ensure that all villages will get
drinking water. Rajiv Gandhi went beyond rhetoric to actually
set up a drinking water mission.

Many will term what is happening in Gujarat and Rajasthan
a natural disaster. But this is far from the truth.
It is a government-made disaster. Over the last
one hundred years or so, we have seen two paradigmatic shifts
in water management. One is that individuals and communities
have steadily given over their role almost completely to the
state. The second is that the simple technology of using rainwater
has declined. Instead exploitation of rivers and groundwater
through dams and tubewells has become the key source of water.
As water in rivers and aquifers is only a small portion of
the total rainwater availability, there is an inevitable growing
and, in many cases, unbearable stress on these sources.

This dependence on the state has meant cost recovery being
poor the financial sustainability of water schemes has run
aground; and, repairs and maintenance is abysmal. With people
having no interest in using water carefully, the sustainability
of water resources has itself become a question mark. As a
result, there are serious problems with government drinking
water supply schemes. Despite all the government efforts,
the number of problem villages does not seem to
go down. As N C Saxena, former rural development secretary
put it recently, In our mathematics, 200,000 problem
villages minus 200,000 problem villages is still 200,000 problem
villages.

Community-based rainwater harvesting  the paradigm of
the past  has in it as much strength today as it ever
did before. A survey conducted by the Centre for Science and
Environment (CSE) of several villages facing drought in Gujarat
and western Madhya Pradesh last December found that all those
villages that had undertaken rainwater harvesting or watershed
development in earlier years had no drinking water problem
and even had some water to irrigate their crops. On the other
hand, neighbouring villages were desperate for water. This
revealed that rainwater harvesting can meet even the acid
test of a bad drought

In late March 2001, we got further confirmation of our conviction.
Going with president K R Narayanan in a helicopter to the
Arvari watershed where he was scheduled to give the Down To
Earth-Joseph C John Award to village Bhaonta-Kolyala in late
March, we could see nothing but barren fields all the way
from Delhi to Alwar. This area is suffering from a drought.
But suddenly we came across green and brown fields and realised
that we had reached the oasis of the Arvari watershed where
several villages have over the last 5-10 years built hundreds
of rainwater harvesting structures. Nobody needed to emphasise
the importance of rainwater harvesting any more. While the
Arvari river was more or less dead, the wells were still full
of water, fields were rich and productive.

What makes rainwater harvesting such a powerful technology?
Just the simple richness of rainwater availability that few
of us realise because of the speed with which water, the worlds
most fluid substance, disappears. Imagine you had a hectare
of land in Barmer, one of Indias places, and you received
100-mm of water in the year, common even for this area. That
means that you received as much as one million litres of water
enough to meet drinking and cooking water needs of 182 people
at a liberal 15 litres per day. Even in the villages suffering
from drought this year, it is not as if there was no rain.
Saurashtra villages, the worst affected, also had 100-300
mm rainfall but they let the water go. It does not matter
how much rain you get if you dont capture it. Cherrapunji,
with 11,000mm annual rainfall, also suffers from drinking
water shortages.

I have consistently argued that there is no village in India
that cannot meet its basic drinking and cooking needs through
rainwater harvesting. Figures speak for themselves. The average
population of an Indian village today is about 1,200. Indias
average annual rainfall is about 1,100 mm. If even only half
this water can be captured, an average Indian village needs
1.2 hectares of land to capture 6.57 million litres of water
it will use in a year for cooking and drinking. If there is
a drought and rainfall levels dip to half the normal, the
land required would rise to a mere 2.4 hectare. And, of course,
any more water the villagers catch can go for irrigation.

To provide lasting relief against drought the government will
need to go beyond promises. It should heed the presidents
advice and prepare a concrete plan of action to develop a mass
movement for water harvesting.

The financial
sustainability of water schemes has run aground;
and, repairs and maintenance is abysmal
Anil Agarwal

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